( ESNUG 388 Item 13 ) -------------------------------------------- [02/27/02]
Subject: ( SNUG 01 #2 ) Customer Discusses Debug Session Using ViewConnect
> ...yawn. Sorry, Aart... not much new, but more hope to see more soon. I
> wanted more on topics like Linux, 64 bit support, cross talk in timing
> delays, & the new tool for sharing views on machines between Synopsys and
> customers out in the field for debugging problems (ViewConnect.) I didn't
> get to see any of this at SNUG, but heard about a good demo on it done at
> EuroSNUG.
>
> - Chris Kiegle of IBM
From: Jay Dutt <JDutt@NetSilicon.com>
Hi, John,
Here's my experience with Tetramax and ViewConnect. At Netsilicon I was
using the old Test Compiler tool but was getting unacceptable (77%) test
coverage results. Since Synopsys informed me that Test Compiler was "end-
of-life" soon and support was minimal, I decided to evaluate Tetramax to
see if I could get that coverage up to the mid-90's %age or higher.
I started the Tetramax evaluation and got stuck -- lots of "cell blockage"
error messages. Synopsys wanted to see the netlist, libraries, scripts,
etc. I was using, but I didn't have permission from management to make
these available off-site, even under NDA. I also had very limited amounts
of time that I could spend on the eval, as I had to get some other real
work done. The Synopsys Applications Consultant was not able to spend a
lot of time at our site to help me solve this problem (there were always
schedule conflicts with my time or her's.) So she suggested using
ViewConnect. This is a Synopsys tool we got set up and running on my Sun
workstation which enabled her to see what was going on from her remote
office, while I was typing commands, running scripts, editing files, etc.
We quickly found that I was using ASIC vendor verilog simulation specific
libraries, not the libraries which called out Tetramax primitives. Fixed
the problem by getting the right libraries from our ASIC vendor.
Then I started getting the good coverage results that I wanted, but there
was another snag: rerunning those vectors through "simulation playback"
revealed mismatches on one of the scan chains in our design. This would
mean that those ATPG vectors would probably cause mismatches on the ASIC
vendor's tester, so the problem had to be corrected. Again, I shared the
problem remotely with the Synopsys AC using ViewConnect. This time with
the Tetramax Analyzer GUI showing the problem chain. We found that there
were two phases of a clock used in the chain (ie. some registers had one
phase, the rest used the other phase). I corrected this, and now have a
set of high coverage ATPG vectors to release to the vendor for test.
By the way, ViewConnect was double-password protected (one on my side and
on from Synopsys) so I was reasonably confident about security. I made
sure I wasn't running as "root" in the xterms under ViewConnect, so
really bad things couldn't happen! Also, I guess you do have to trust
Synopsys not to do something bad on their side, as they can remotely
type commands on the xterm shell as well. It took about 3 or 4
ViewConnect sessions to complete the Tetramax evaluation, each lasting
about 30 minutes.
- Jay Dutt
Netsilicon, Inc.
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